PAWS/Getting started with PAWS

This page contains information about how to get started with PAWS.

Overview

The page contains a link to a comprehensive notebook based tutorial that you can follow to get started with PAWS and navigate the control panel. This page also includes a Quickstart guide for those who want to get started right away.

Prerequisites

Since PAWS is hosted in the cloud and requires no installation, you can use PAWS without installing any software. Some programming knowledge can be useful but is not necessary to use the service for many purposes.

Notebook based tutorial

Get Started with PAWS - This notebook based tutorial provides a comprehensive walkthrough of the PAWS service.

Quickstart

The following steps will help you get logged in and perform some very basic tasks with PAWS.

Open PAWS
Click the Sign in with MediaWiki button.
- This is your Wikimedia Single User Login (SUL). If you don't have a Wikimedia SUL account, you'll need to create one first.
Allow permission for PAWS to perform some actions on your behalf.

Create

Create a new or upload an existing notebook.

Click the New button and choose your notebook type. You can choose Python 3, Bash and R or folder, text file or terminal.

Share your notebook using a public link.

Alter the URL manually to make your notebook public: https://public-paws.wmcloud.org/User:YOURUSERNAME/YOURNOTEBOOK.ipynb

Fork

Fork an existing notebook

Get the URL of another public PAWS notebook. Example: https://public-paws.wmcloud.org/YOURUSERNAME/YOURNOTEBOOK.ipynb
Add ?format=raw to the end of the URL to download a raw .ipynb file. Example: https://public-paws.wmcloud.org/YOURUSERNAME/YOURNOTEBOOK.ipynb?format=raw
Log into your PAWS account and use "upload" to upload this copy into your own directory.

Usage and Storage limits

PAWS usage is periodically monitored and scanned for appropriate uses. Any use unrelated to Wikimedia, Mediawiki, or free content is not allowed.

Please be mindful of your storage consumption. Any single file larger than 1 GiB stored in PAWS will be removed after a few hours, and any aggregate notebook storage deemed excessive by PAWS admins may be deleted without notice. Do not use PAWS as a backup server or media server, and never rely on PAWS as a reliable home for valuable code or data.

Excessively large files and notebooks are often, but not always, set aside for a few weeks before total deletion. If you find important data missing, it may be possible to recover it if you contact a cloud administrator or file a task on phabricator.